New Year’s Feast

It’s 2011 (two thousand and eleven or twenty eleven?) already, can you believe it? And they say we wouldn’t make it pass 2000, haha. In Mexico New Year’s is celebrated with family, just like Christmas. Moms and grandmoms get together to prepare big pots of food to feed their extended families. There are a lot of traditional dishes for this time of the year like turkey, romeritos, bacalao (cod), ham, duck, ponche, etc.

My family doesn’t celebrate this holiday either, just like Christmas, but my mom loves to cook this kind of food so she made bacalao, dried cod with a lot of olive oil, tomato, onion, yellow peppers, olives and parsley. This is a very classical dish and people make tortas (Mexican sandwiches) with leftovers, just like turkey sandwiches back in the States. This is one of my favorite dish of the season.

There’s another very traditional dish called romeritos. This dish is made with springs of a wild plant that resembles rosemary, potatoes, nopales, mole and dried shrimp patties. I believe this dish is very typical only in Mexico City and surrounding areas. I have to confess that this dish wasn’t my favorite when I was a kid, but now that I’ve given it a second chance I really liked it. I guess everything tastes different if you don’t eat it for 10 years.

I’m not including the recipes for these dishes because a lot of the ingredients are very regional (romeritos for example are not even found in other states of the country). But if you ever come to Mexico and want to cook any of this dishes, sent me a message and I’ll email you the recipes. How did you celebrate New Year’s?

Are those tiny criolla potatoes in the bacalao? Interesting. Looks wonderful. I wrote about romeritos a couple of years ago on my blog and mentioned that they were my son's favorite vegetable growing up (the opposite of you!). He loved them steamed with nothing–or occasionally with a non-traditional dollop of yogurt! Nice post, thanks!